Wine is a favorite beverage consumed daily around the world, as well as included as part of specific occasions, such as weddings and/or birthdays, for example. It is also a business, which generates billions of dollars per year. There is a wide spectrum of wines of different values, whose value and cost may widely vary.
Counterfeit consumer goods are imitation products offered for sale that are intended to either deceive the consumer or to take unfair advantage of the renown of the brand name. The spread of counterfeit goods has become global in recent years and the variety of such counterfeiting has increased significantly.
In the case of wine fraud, inferior wines are passed off or sold to a customer, usually at a price higher than what the product is worth. Such illicit products may cause sickness due to harmful chemicals being included in the wine. In recent years, much attention has been focused on label fraud, where counterfeit labels from cult wines and other rare and expensive wines, for example, are affixed to bottles of less expensive wine, and then resold. Wine fraud can also involve less expensive wines, for example, if they are sold in large volumes. Wine Spectator noted that some experts suspect that as much as 5% of the wine sold in secondary markets could be counterfeit.
As noted above one form of fraud involves affixing counterfeit labels of expensive wines to bottles of less expensive wine. Initially, label fraud mostly consisted of taking a wine from a region of lesser acclaim (such as Southwest France or Calabria in Italy) and then labeling the wine as if it came from more prestigious regions such as Bordeaux or Tuscany. To counter this type of fraud, governments developed extensive appellation systems and Protected Designations of Origin or (PDOs) that attempted to regulate wines labeled as coming from particular wine regions. Early attempts to protect the name of a wine region lead to government declarations on the boundaries and wines permitted to carry the names of Chianti, Oporto and Tokaji. Today most major European wine producing countries utilize some appellation system of protected origins. The most well-known systems include the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) used in France, the Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) used in Italy, the Denominação de Origem Controlada (DOC) used in Portugal, and the Denominación de Origen (DO) system used in Spain. Producers who are registered in association with each appellation must abide by the appellation's rules, including exact percentage of grapes (often 100%) that must come from that region. Producers who fraudulently use grapes from outside the region they are proclaiming on their wine labels can be pursued by the appellation's authorities.
As it became more difficult to fraudulently label wines with the wrong provenance, label fraud soon evolved to the pilfering of the identities of wine estates themselves. Merchants would take the bottles of lesser priced wines and label them with the names of the finest classified Bordeaux estates or Grand crus of Burgundy. Thus, the temptation remains very high to replace one famous or expensive wine with another cheaper wine, for example. This unfair behavior misleads the consumer, who believes they are buying a good wine quality, but actually acquires a fake wine.
Although consumers are the prime victims of the blight of counterfeit and illicit trade, rights holders also suffer significant impacts. This can be both economically, from the loss of sales and revenue, due to forgery and use forgeries, and also in that penal liability for unfit products can be imputed to the apparent rights holders. They then have to establish their innocence to avoid claims for damages and invest significant effort to re-establish brand image as well as to ensure countermeasures are taken against the true culprits of the illicit trade.
Attempts to solve this issue have been the subject of intensive study since 1900. U.S. Pat. No. 896,095A discloses a thin strip of glass of less width than the bottle, attached at one end only to a side of the bottle near the bottom and extending above the mouth thereof; the extending portion, after the bottle is filled and corked, is caused to bend down over the stopper by softening the strip at a suitable point by heat. The name of the proprietor or manufacturer, or the name of the preparation may be impressed on the strip instead of the bottle, and as the strip is destroyed when bottle is opened, the bottle cannot be used, again without detection.
Today sophisticated methods exist to avoid diversion and/or counterfeiting which are extensively used. For example, an RFID tag may be attached to the bottle, or the capsule on the bottle, which provides conventional protection for a wine bottle. Additionally, a barcode or an alphanumeric identifier may be used, as well as holograms and tamper evident structures. These technologies, however, all have a common drawback, in that these technologies are at least partially visible, thus possibly affecting the global appearance and design of the bottle and its label paper, which also serves as an identifier of the origin of the wine bottle.
There remains, however, a need to provide not only a solution that is not visible to the unaided eye, but also a solution that will not affect or even necessarily form a part of the original design of the bottle (or is at least be less invasive), while also ensuring such security features have a high level of security and/or coding properties to guard against forgery and are able to provide track-and-trace information for the bottles produced around the world.